MVP 2012 - Directory Services

I received this in my mail yesterday:

___________
Dear Jimmy Andersson,

Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2012 Microsoft® MVP Award! This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. We appreciate your outstanding contributions in Directory Services technical communities during the past year.
___________

This is the 14th year in a row I got honored with this award, and I'm proud of it!

Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Blog

The Microsoft Server and Cloud Platform Blog can be found here.

More Win8 info

Bill Laing, Corporate Vice President Server & Cloud, posted some good information about Win8 that can be found here.

Windows 8 Consumer Preview

The Consumer Preview of Windows 8 is released and can be downloaded from MSDN. If you don't have MSDN go to this link.

Consumer Preview FAQ.

--snip--
Note before you download: Windows 8 Consumer Preview is prerelease software that may be substantially modified before it’s commercially released. Microsoft makes no warranties, express or implied, with respect to the information provided here. Some product features and functionality may require additional hardware or software. If you decide to go back to your previous operating system, you'll need to reinstall it from the recovery or installation media that came with your PC
--snip--

New Group Policy Settings in Windows 8 Consumer Preview

Alex Verboon have created a list of all the new settings for Win8 Consumer Preview. You can find them here.

Policy vs Preferences

I read an interesting post from Darren Mar-Elia about this. I've been thinking about it but I can't articulate it as well as he. So if you ever thought about the question, please look at his blog here.

Change DNS on multiple computers - Now in PowerShell

I published a script to change DNS on multiple computers a while back (here it is). It was written in VBScript. Now there is an update written in PowerShell by my colleague and friend Jan Egil Ring (PowerShell MVP).

Here is his mail with a link to the module:
--BEGIN--
“Hi Jimmy,

I finally got time to finish the blog-post:

http://blog.powershell.no/2011/11/22/introducing-the-powershell-network-adapter-configuration-module

Rather than creating a single script for the specific task I ended up creating a function in PowerShell, including capabilities such as error handling, logging and the option to either replace or add/remove entries from the DNSSearchOrder-list.
I also ended up creating a module I published on Codeplex, since I couldn`t find any complete library for managing network adapters from PowerShell (or other languages for that matter).
So let`s hope people in the community will contribute with more commands to the module… J (Win 8 will provide native modules for things like this, but I guess they won`t be backward compatible)”
--END--

And here is the Script:

--BEGIN--
I couldn`t resist re-writing your script into PowerShell ;)

It does reset the DNSServerSearchOrder rather than replacing specified IPs, so it`s not exactly the same.

# NAME:Set-DNSServer.ps1

#
# AUTHOR: Jan Egil Ring
# EMAIL: [JImmy removed this]
#
# VERSION HISTORY:
# 1.0 06.10.2011 - Initial release

#Custom variables

$FilePath = "C:\serverNames.txt"
$DNSServerSearchOrder = "10.230.20.9","10.230.20.10"

 foreach ($computer in $FilePath) {

if (Test-Connection -ComputerName $computer -Count 1 -Quiet) {
$NICs = Get-WmiObject -Query "SELECT * FROM Win32_NetworkAdapterConfiguration WHERE IPEnabled = TRUE AND DHCPEnabled = FALSE" -Computer $computer
if ($NICs) {
foreach ($NIC in $NICs) {
if ($NIC.DNSServerSearchorder) {
$NIC.SetDNSServerSearchOrder($DNSServerSearchOrder)
}
}
}

}

else {
Write-Host "Unable to contact $computer"
}
}
--END--